The political consequences of the Italian mixed electoral system (1994-2001)

Abstract

The article deals with the impact of the new Italian electoral system introduced in 1993 for the election of the two houses of parliament. The aspects analysed include the format of the party system, that is, the number of units that enter the competition and the number of units that achieve representation through that competition, and the dynamics of electoral competition, that is the constraints that are exercised over the «most rewarding» electoral strategy of competition followed by the parties. It is argued that from these two points of view, mixed electoral systems like the Italian one, that truly combine different electoral formulas, present a number of puzzling issues and effects. In these cases, little can be derived from the traditional debate about the «laws» of electoral systems impact exactly because the mixing up of elements of plurality/majority voting with element of proportional representation usually yields an extremely complex set of constraints and opportunities that can hardly be reduced to simple generalisations. The best strategy is to unfold the two main questions (impact on format and dynamics) into a set of lower level questions and then try to reconstruct the general impact of a specific mixed electoral system.